Project – Boom Boom Soccer

I was in charge of the lighting, shaders and vfx on this project. I also performed a lot of profiling and optimization tasks. Boom Boom Soccer and Football shared all the shader code, so the two projects are very similar in that regard with Boom Boom Football being further along. Please do check out the boom boom football page

The game utilizes high dynamic range rendering with tonemapping, unsharp mask, depth of field, colorgrading, bloom, Image based pseudo lens flares, signed distance field text and decals (The stadium field lines, jersey numbers on the players, PCF 4×4 shadows, multi step parallax mapped grass, ramp shading with blinn specular, sphere reflection mapping for character shading on the cards and reflections, RGBM encoded hdr lightmaps, height and distance based fog with pseudo sun light scattering and a whole lot more. The shaders were designed to be very scalable and scaled from the iPhone 4s spec to the iPhone 6. They utilized every bit of rendering power all the devices under that umbrella had to offer.

I joined the Boom Boom soccer team towards the end of development just before we decided to revamp most of it. I was given plenty of freedom to make the game look better and I took this unique opportunity and ran with it. It was already a good looking game, but I wanted to try a different approach with the visuals and go for more a rendered lit look rather than a self illuminated hand painted look. So I worked together with some of the most talented artists at Hothead Games and we came up with a look that we were all very happy with. While not only looking better, the new shaders reduced iteration and development time of new assets and gave the artists more freedom. We ended up saving on texture space which was crucial as the build had to fit within a 100mb limit. Boom Boom Soccer is still in soft launch, but we applied the same principles to Boom Boom Football which was launched worldwide and we got a really great banner feature from Apple. It is also constantly featured in the “sports collection”.

This is what the game looked like before we did a pass on the graphics